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Brent P. Smith ’71

Brent Pendleton Smith ’71, August 22, 2006, near the village of IIiamna, Alaska, securing his fishing boat in a storm. Brent received a BA from Reed in mathematics. He earned a PhD from Louisiana State University in 1977, and taught at Kansas State University, the University of Kentucky, Illinois State University, Cal Tech, and Bellcore, before returning to Kansas as a professor of mathematics in 1989. For his contribution to the resolution of the Littlewood Conjecture, he was awarded a Sloan fellowship (1982–84). His academic contributions also included work on exponential sums and the study of the quantitative behavior of Fourier-Stieltjes transforms. He wrote over 20 publications in analysis and worked on a variety of problems in analytic number theory. During summer months, he did commercial salmon fishing in Alaska. Survivors include his son, parents, brother, and sister.

Appeared in Reed magazine: February 2007